"Does it sing?"
At my old law firm, that was code for "Is your brief finished?" Admittedly, if you're not a lawyer, the prospect of a singing legal brief will probably leave you cold. But there's truth to the musical metaphor. An elegant legal brief (a written argument submitted to a court) has all the harmony of great prose.
The Bluebook . . . exemplifies hypertrophy in the anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and its student subculture.
Judge Richard Owen of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan gathered a group of lawyers in his courtroom in 2007 to discuss the possible leak of sealed documents in a business case. As the hearing got under way, Owen, then 84, asked for someone to explain this newfangled mode of communication the lawyers kept mentioning: e-mail. "It pops up in a machine in some administrative office, and is somebody there with a duty to take it around and give it to whoever it's named to?" he asked.
The only reason today's teachers learned to use two spaces is because their teachers were in the grip of old-school technology. We would never accept teachers pushing other outmoded ideas on kids because that's what was popular back when they were in school. The same should go for typing. So, kids, if your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: "If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong."
...you might think that the prospect of high-speed police chases and sweaty-palmed drug busts would get the justices' criminal juices flowing. But for the most part, their knowledge and understanding of American criminal activity seems to be ripped right out of the Wile E. Coyote playbook.
The U.S. Supreme Court is wrestling with a case that could give police greater power to forcibly enter a home without a warrant. The Constitution bars warrantless searches except in certain circumstances — for example, an emergency search to prevent the destruction of evidence. But on Wednesday, the question before the court was whether police, by themselves creating such exigent circumstances, are unconstitutionally evading the warrant requirement.
Arizona Orders Tucson to End Mexican-American Studies Program - NYTimes.com...Mr. Acosta’s class and others in the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American program have been declared illegal by the State of Arizona — even while similar programs for black, Asian and American Indian students have been left untouched.
"Anchor babies" are back in the news: Be prepared for another round of railing against the granting of automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. There was a burst of this last summer, when Sen. Lindsey Graham rumbled about pregnant Mexican women crossing the border to give birth and win American citizenship for their babies—which he inelegantly called "drop and leave"—and how it was necessary to change the Constitution to stop them. Now Rep. Steve King of Iowa promises to end automatic birthright citizenship through legislation, and conservative legislators from five states are talking about excluding kids from a new thing called state citizenship, and also creating distinct (second-class) birth certificates for these kids.
